Don Jr gleans for some less than helpful insights into Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance — “Arab youths fight shoulder to shoulder with Mujahedeen.” (sic)

Only a very daft person would think that the disappearance into thin air of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi falls into the category of normal everyday happenings. And only a very naive person would discount the involvement of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in either the kidnapping or likely death of Jamal Khashoggi. And although Don Jr is not known to be the sharpest tool in any shed, Junior’s insinuations that Jamal Khashoggi was the sort of man who nurtured and maintained terrorist links are shocking allegations, not least because such sly imputations appear to be a desperate attempt to absolve the Saudi crown prince of any involvement in the commission of a vile deed such as the murder of a dissident.

And one of the easiest ways to besmirch a political dissident in an effort to make it look like he was some kind of lawless thug who deserved for his body parts to be found swirling in the Bosphorus, is of course to gather "evidence" in support of the spurious contention that so and so was a hardened supporter of terrorist causes. To this end, Patrick Poole a charlatan of a security correspondent for a conservative blog known as Pajamas media, a blog where they presumably gossip all day and sleep all night, could not help but tweet his glee upon discovering that journalist Jamal Khashoggi had once covered the Afghan Mujahideen.

And what a eureka moment it must’ve been for Mr Poole when he finally got the chance to point out the obvious and reveal that a journalist who’d covered the anti-soviet Mujahideen had sought to cultivate ties with sources close to Bin Laden and to Al Qaeda. Bin Laden and others were of course at the time fighting alongside the Afghan Mujahideen who’d risen up against Soviet occupation. And yes, like millions in Saudi Arabia Jamal Khashoggi was reared in the conservative Islamic tradition and was closely allied with some royal court insiders, but we also know that Mr Khashoggi became an agitator for less traditionalist perspectives and hence his religious upbringing and his past political affiliations hardly sum up the entirety of who Jamal Khashoggi was. And mind you, if every journalist who’d ever covered terrorist groups had shrunk from cultivating unsavoury sources for fear of being lampooned as a terrorist, then it’s safe to say that a large chunk of the database of information that exists about Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, or even ISIS, would remain information that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.

I would also remind the dunderhead named Don Jr who retweeted Mr Poole’s untutored musings regarding Jamal Khashoggi’s coverage of the Afghan Mujahideen (no doubt hoping that readers would catch a whiff of something of the insurgent about Jamal Khashoggi), that it was actually a CIA operation codenamed Operation Cyclone which served as a conduit to arm and to fund the Afghan Mujahideen. Journalists like Jamal Khashoggi merely covered the events of the time as they unfolded, and unlike the Americans were not actively funding future terrorists straight out of the madrassas of Saudi Arabia. Chickens do eventually come home to roost though. And while it seems improbable in hindsight, it’s astonishing to think that there was a time when Americans thought of Osama bin Laden as a man whom they could mould into their own image and likeness.

But as for Jamal Khashoggi, he hardly fits the bill as an angry and strident man of the calibre that brandish weapons and overthrow kingdoms at a moment’s notice. Indeed Jamal Khashoggi’s’s criticism of Mohammed bin Salman has never been of a temperature to raise anyone’s hackles, unless of course one was just naturally predisposed to do violence to Mr Khashoggi for no comprehensible reason whatsoever. And no amount of "dirt" that cockamamie theorists like Don Jr and Patrick Poole can dig up about Mr Khashoggi, suffices to detract from the fact that Jamal Khashoggi walked into a Saudi consulate on his own two feet but did not re-emerge not even to confound rumours of his inexplicable disappearance.

In fact, at this point in the Jamal Khashoggi whodunnit murder mystery, Don Jr and the entire Trump family (who admittedly are not renowned for their political savvy) might want to begin to re-evaluate their close relationship with Mohammed bin Salman. For with each passing day and hour since October 2nd when Jamal Khashoggi strolled into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul never to be seen again, it must now be assumed with an increasing degree of certainty that someone killed or ordered the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, perhaps someone like Don Jr’s close pal Mohammed bin Salman.